SNAP!

The sound of a finger snapping rang out, and a vortex appeared in the hall.

"To the venue of the second test."

The UEF official said, and White was led forward with the rest of the officers.

Officer Macmillan was left behind.

---

The feeling of teleportation was brief, and when White reappeared, he found himself descending from the sky.

Beneath him was the mouth of a bubbling volcano, seemingly welcoming him, but then,

RIIIIIIIIIIP

The air shook as two wings burst out of White, and his falling motion instantly stopped before he turned up.

He had no idea how that had happened, but the Commanders weren’t falling like him.

A glassy platform had appeared beneath their feet just overhead, and White watched as it began to move them forward.

"The second assessment is this world. A simulation of blockades."

"The environment itself will try to prevent you from reaching its end, and you will come across powerful beasts that will try to devour you within."

"Your mission is simple. You have 45 minutes to reach as far in as possible."

"The farther in you can go at the end of the 45 minutes, the higher your assessment score in this phase of the test."

"Now... go!"

He said, and in the next moment, White simply disappeared.

"Huh?"

They quickly turned behind them, and there, about a thousand meters away, was White, who had already turned into a beam of dark light.

"Aren’t his wings a cheat? Normal humans don’t have that."

An officer asked, but another shrugged.

"No. There are some places where flight is impossible. He’ll be forced down soon enough."

---

The officer’s words were correct.

At first, it was subtle, just a faint resistance brushing against his wings, like flying through thicker air.

It didn’t slow him, but something about it felt... wrong.

Then, all of a sudden,

THUMMMM!

The space around him dropped, as if the world itself had gained weight, and White’s wings faltered for a split second.

"Hmmm?"

SHHHHKKK!

A ripple spread through the air, and instantly, his speed came to a halt as his wings struggled to hold him afloat.

The further he moved forward, the heavier it became.

At first, he reasoned that gravity had simply increased, but then he realized that wasn’t the case.

He couldn’t feel much strain on his body, just the wings alone.

White paused for a moment, closing his eyes and sensing things before they snapped open all at once as he realized it.

"Spatial Suppression."

It was one of those things usually made to happen through the use of runes.

There was a name for it: runic laws.

There was a runic law around this environment that denied movement in the air.

White’s wings had broken through the rule and were therefore targeted by the spatial law, placing so much pressure that he couldn’t move them.

"Then I’ll just run instead."

White mused, withdrawing his wings as he fell from the sky, yet halfway through,

BUUUUURSSSSST!

The ground ahead, a volcanic terrain, split open as a massive snake-like creature burst out from its depths.

It was like a giant larvaconda, its body made of obsidian plates and molten veins, with a massive jaw that instantly wound around him, clenching hard to devour him in one gulp.

It had not yet begun to close around White when the entire maw detached from the creature as White spun, his wings ripping out and cleaving circularly like blades.

The creature fell back down into the magma, and White landed, splashing molten rock from the force.

"Quite hot."

White noted, feeling the temperature spike, though not enough to make him sweat.

But that wasn’t the problem.

The ground beneath him wasn’t stable, partly because he was standing on the larva-conda’s corpse, but mostly because all around him was lava, with black rocks floating around.

He jumped onto one of those rocks, and then,

SSSSSSSS

The terrain softened as it sank, and he was slowly forced into the lava.

It never reached him before White flashed back, appearing on the larva-conda.

"So all of this lava and everything else is just floating in it."

"I could fly over it, but the law prevents flight."

He mused before rolling his eyes.

"Activate Zero Crown."

White ordered, and a ripple of blue appeared and enveloped him.

Lowering to the ground,

BUUUUUURSSSSST!

Lava exploded behind him as he tore through the air at mind-numbing speed.

He moved so fast that by the time the first rock he stepped on began sinking into the lava, he was already on the twelfth!

There were occasional splashes of lava into the sky, but they all paused meters away from White, who easily dodged them.

The creatures were unending, coming out and furiously attacking, and he responded with two things:

Dodging their attacks with Zero Crown, or simply cleaving them into pieces with his wings.

Like this, he continued far into the distance, before eventually arriving at a new terrain, yet he never slowed down.

Collapses were happening all around, the sense of gravity so skewed that White sometimes felt weightless, and in other moments, he felt like he weighed a thousand pounds, but Zero Crown made him ignore many of these effects and continue regardless.

He didn’t restrict his speed, and soon enough, he came across what should be the end of this space.

A simple dark void of nothing but darkness.

There, he paused, finding what seemed to be a wall that signified the end.

He had raced to the end of the simulation.

He waited for minutes before watching the platform the officers stood on make its way toward him before floating down.

"So... is it forty-five minutes yet?"

He asked, as though the men reined in their shock, though their eyes wouldn’t stop looking at him like he was a monster.

The test wasn’t to reach the end. Almost no one had ever reached the end.

It was to go as far as possible within 45 minutes.

White didn’t just go far, he went so fast that he reached the end before the time frame was over.

"You passed. The last assessment begins."

He said as he slowly stepped down from the platform.

"And what will the last assessment be?"

White asked.

"An assessment of combat ability."